The Preservation Management Handbook: A 21st Century Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Citation

Shannon Wellington (2015), "The Preservation Management Handbook: A 21st Century Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums", Library Review, Vol. 64 No. 6/7, pp. 505-506. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-03-2015-0033

Harvey and Mahard’s Preservation Management Handbook is an excellent introductory text to the field of preservation management. The content of the book is accessible to those with little experience in the field and equally as valuable to those preservation management professionals needing to re-familiarise themselves with preservation principles.

There are two parts to the handbook. The first provides context for preservation practice by embedding preservation management in the broader cultural heritage domain. It is essential to remember that the driving force for preservation action will depend largely on the individual mandates of the library, archive and museum domains. The book presents preservation management in a form that spans these domains; issues such as prioritising the artefact or the information in a preservation paradigm are sympathetically (albeit briefly) addressed.

The second part of the book provides detail around the management and treatment of specific formats commonly found in libraries, archives and museum. The authors are knowledgeable and the treatment of these specific formats is arranged in a style that is suitable for a reference handbook. The formats covered are paper objects and books, photographic materials, sound materials, moving image materials, digital storage media and files, textiles and paintings.

The content on preservation of digital objects is particularly well considered and stresses that ways of thinking about preservation management in an analogue paradigm cannot and should not be applied directly to a digital space. The authors place a lot of emphasis on migration and reformatting of digital objects as part of the preservation process. The Handbook clearly states that “no digital storage media are stable enough for preservation purposes so all files should be migrated off all media as soon as possible after acquisition”; my only comment on this section is that there is little discussion about emulation; the information is migration-centric.

The preservation management handbook will be a useful text for small- to medium-sized institutions and for students of preservation management. Although a comprehensive variety of formats are covered, if you want in-depth information about a particular format and more of a philosophical discussion relating to the intellectual aspects of preserving these specific formats, then you would be the best to head to a detailed work on that particular subject. The handbook is what it says and does what it should. It is a welcome addition to the body of work in the field and would make an excellent textbook for graduate students of preservation management.